From left, Melissa Nicholas helps Dwight Smith and Leia Smith run the Isaiah House, a women's homeless shelter in Santa Ana. The Smiths have run for the house for the past 20 years.

Two residents at the Isaiah House make up their beds on mats in Santa Ana on Thursday. Women at the homeless shelter are given a place to bathe, sleep and interact while they look for jobs and homes.

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A stack of recently-donated books sits on a bench outside the Isaiah House in Santa Ana on Thursday. Women at the homeless shelter are given a place to bathe, sleep and interact while they look for jobs and homes.

Nobody who ends up at Isaiah House, the rambling old two-story on Cypress Avenue in Santa Ana, ever planned to be there. Not even Leia and Dwight Smith – and especially not Melissa Nicholas – could have guessed this is where they’d be. And they’re the Catholic Workers who run the place.

One gray morning as the weather was starting to hint at autumn, Leia sat in the barebones kitchen on the second floor. A huge iron cage, the home of an injured wild parrot named Rita taken in by the Smiths, is the room’s only adornment. What Leia had to offer was strong black coffee in a Styrofoam cup and the story of why she, a former stockbroker who notoriously can’t cook, and Dwight, her firebrand of a husband who was once a manager at 3M Corporation, have spent the last 20 years not getting paid, serving 3,000 meals a week to the hungry, passionately advocating for the needs of the homeless and opening their home to live communally with no fewer than 40 women a week who have nowhere else to turn.

It is the calling of the Catholic Worker, a movement formed during the Great Depression that was built on the practices of voluntary poverty and committing what Catholics call “Works of Mercy.” Those include – among other things – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, sheltering the homeless, comforting the doubtful and forgiving all injuries.

“Here, you are affiliating with brokenness. You are standing on the margins of everything,” Leia’s explains in a calm, patient voice.” We come together as people who are really in need of one another. We all want to be seen for who we are, and who we are is broken. None of us is perfect.”

But when Dwight and Leia met at a camera shop in Torrance – this year is their 30th wedding anniversary – neither one would have imagined this would be their life. He was fairly agnostic and working in the business world; she was raised in a Methodist home but went by the “spiritual, not religious” description, and influenced by the Women’s Movement of the ’70s, was striving to be a success-oriented professional.

“My dad always wanted me to be an engineer or a lawyer, but what did I do? I became a Catholic Worker,” Dwight jokes in his trademark irony.

Leia found that she hated being a stockbroker – ”the clothes never fit right,” she says, speaking metaphorically, although the pantyhose weren’t great, either – so she left to go into marketing for a textbook publisher. Still, there was a longing for something more.

“I can remember sitting in my living room in Fullerton saying, if I am 50 and I am still selling textbooks, that won’t be good for me. There is nothing wrong with this, there is noting amoral about this, but it wasn’t satisfying something,” she says. “I don’t know that I identified it as anything more than a sense that achievement wasn’t enough, having stuff wasn’t enough. For me the real question was, ‘I don’t have children, so what am I leaving the future? How am I investing in the future right now? Life is kind of all about me.’”

Both of them, she says, were searching for something more out of life, with what she now believes was “a spiritual hunger for God and a longing for community.” They found themselves at middle age “church hopping.” The Catholic Church was the “only one open the night we went church shopping,” she says with a shrug. “It’s true.”

What seemed coincidence soon felt like predestination when the couple found themselves at Isaiah House, where Leia’s sister was an active part of the community – involved with stewardship by making meals, cleaning, collecting donations, etc. It was 1993.

They were attracted to every part of life there, in a part of town where “I used to lock my doors when I drove through,” she says.

“We had the liturgy, and people were praying for me by name. I had never had anyone pray for me by name. Afterwards we ate the meal they had all prepared,” Leia says. “So this is just, like, shocking to me, in that belief and faith was so organically there. It also was not preachy. There was a lot of talk about justice and Works of Mercy and the love of God, but it wasn’t like ‘you’re bad if…’. It was a different invitation.”

What kept them interested, she explains, was the simplicity of it all. “It’s great to be in a faith where you really realize the simplicity of kindness, where a simple conversation and just being there for somebody, having dinner together. You have language for that being sacramental. That is at the core of the Worker.”

She remembers the moment it all changed for them. She and Dwight were eating lunch at a deli. “Dwight looked across the table at me and said, ‘This Jesus stuff, I believe it.’ And I said, ‘I do too.’ The whole world was shifted. It was in color, not black and white. Everything was imbued with meaning.”

In 1996, when her sister was sick with cancer and the community was coming apart, someone needed to step in and take stewardship of Isaiah House and try to meet the overwhelming need of the county’s homeless. Dwight took the lead in stepping up.

“I was nobody’s first choice. I don’t think there is anybody who likes me, except maybe my wife – intermittently” says Dwight, who in the past two decades has become a vocal critic of the county board of surpervisors’ handling of homeless facilities. (Let’s just say that “admonishing the sinner” is another of the Works of Mercy – and to Dwight, there’s evidently nothing more sinful than political handwringing.)

Dwight notes it’s fair to say that while he took the lead in the beginning, Leia and Melissa Nicholas are manning the ship these days. “Makes sense that a woman’s shelter should be run by women,” he says. “Sometimes, guys should just shut up.”

With her frosted blonde, California Girl good looks, Melissa at first appears more Real Housewives than homeless shelter director. It’s hard to imagine that five years ago, she came here not for a job but because she herself was homeless. A bad break up and a shopping addiction – really a lifetime of bad choices with men and money – landed Melissa, now 42, at the Isaiah House.

“I was the golden girl, this wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” says Melissa, who has never spoken publically about her struggles. “A lot of people in my life now want know how I started doing this, and I make up a story because it is so shameful.”

She echoes Dwight and Leia, saying that while the face of the homeless may be those with mental illness, the other silent part is people who have simply become unwoven from the social fabric through job loss, a few bad choices, a series of unfortunate events. When she was in trouble she was like so many she sees now – ”I wouldn’t go to my family. I had caused them enough grief in life,” she says, ticking off her past in an abusive relationship and giving up one child for adoption. “This was just one more shame.”

But at Isaiah House, “forgiveness is the rent,” which is the name of Dwight’s blog. Says Leia: “We all have to forgive each other for just being human, for being flawed. We are going to screw up, including us – we all have to learn to tolerate each other. And forgive.”

Samantha Dunn is the executive editor of Coast Magazine, and the author of several books including the novel Failing Paris and a bestselling memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life. Sam’s work is anthologized in a number of places, including the short story anthology, Women on the Edge: Writing from Los Angeles, which she co-edited. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America and teaches at Chapman University, in the UCLA Extension Writers Program and at the Idyllwild Arts Center in California.

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[…] of Amnesty International at Orange Coast College, and began volunteering at Isaiah House, a Catholic Worker home in Santa Ana for destitute women run by Dwight and Leia Smith. The then 20-year-old Aly became an admirer of Smith’s fiery style […]